


White Noise

by elsmaster



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Gen, Nightmares, Post-3A, Sleep Deprivation, Stream of Consciousness, Unreliable Narrator
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-01-03
Updated: 2014-01-03
Packaged: 2018-01-07 07:32:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,261
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1117209
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/elsmaster/pseuds/elsmaster
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Stiles won’t let himself fall asleep, because that way lie monsters, and those monsters are way more terrifying than a few shape shifters with anger management issues.</p>
            </blockquote>





	White Noise

He’s running on fumes. Has been for a while now, so it’s not exactly news to anyone. Or wouldn’t be, if they ever got around to talking about things like Stiles’ need for an epic nap, but since all of them have some _way_ bigger fish to fry, heartfelt conversations about a specific human’s sleep-deprivation aren’t exactly on top of their list of priorities.

Things that are on top of that list of priorities include unsolved murder and mayhem, but it’s not the dime-a-dozen kind they’re used to dealing with. It’s something else, and it doesn’t make _sense_.

It’s evading them, all explanations just out of reach and illogical, impossible, like those dreams where you keep chasing something, and don’t even know why or what or how, but you just chase, because somehow that _feels_ like the right thing to do. Because that feels like the only thing that makes sense.

Stiles’ list of things that make sense has gotten considerably bigger since Scott got bit. Sometimes he’s not sure it’s a good thing.

Stiles can feel the sleep-deprivation with every inch of his body, his nightmares following him into his waking hours because he doesn’t get a chance to experience them fully while unconscious. He sleeps an hour or two at a time, even when there’s no imminent threat to his, or anyone else’s, life, because it’s become a habit; his body can’t settle down. His mind can’t settle down. He won’t let himself fall asleep, because that way lie monsters and those monsters are way more terrifying than a few shape shifters with anger management issues

Sometimes he’s not sure if he’s awake or not. Sometimes he feels like an outsider, watching life happen around him, yet unable to move a muscle himself. Sometimes nothing remarkable happens. He’ll just sit through breakfast with his dad, and suddenly wake up at his desk in Math.

Sometimes there’s a dead weight on his chest, and voices he can’t place, can’t understand. Sometimes it feels like he spends hours and hours, immobile, watching as reality shifts and bends around him, into shapes and creatures that shouldn’t exist.

Sometimes, when he snaps awake on the sofa, or in his bed, or in the locker room at school, he can’t tell if he has been dreaming or not. He can’t tell if he still is.

He’s a wreck, he knows he is, and some days he jumps at the sight of his own reflection, his own shadow, the sound of his own footsteps.

So, he runs on fumes. But so what, it’s not like he’s the only one. It’s not like all of them haven’t been stretched so thin they’re practically transparent and isn’t that an idea. Invisible werewolves. Huh.

It’s not like Scott and Allison aren’t feeling it too. It’s not like they’re not battling their own demons. It’s not like the entire pack isn’t completely fucked up to begin with, constantly under so much stress they haven’t exactly been making brilliant decisions for a long time. Brilliant decisions take time, and that’s something they definitely don’t have.

 And nothing makes sense, and nothing seems to come any clearer.

The point _is_ : Stiles is not special. His need to sleep isn’t exactly unexpected, or original. They all need sleep, but there’s no _time_.

Everyone else is doing a bang-up job at looking like they’re not about to burst at the seams, though, and sometimes Stiles wonders if he actually is the only one who won’t be able to pretend for much longer.

Stiles hears himself agree to a plan to stake out the evasive mass murderer who’s butchering his way through Beacon Hills, and he swears he has no idea how he ended up at the loft, leaning onto the high table with the rest of the pack. The evasive mass-murderer is, apparently, the only fucker in town who has time to get some shuteye, and someone (Scott? Isaac? He’s sure he knows but it’s covered in a layer of cotton wool) has tracked him down to an abandoned storage building just outside of town.

Which, well, not a very original location for a villain’s lair, right? And that’s why they need to make sure. That’s why Stiles sits in his Jeep at ass-o’clock in the morning/night/whenever, strategically hidden just behind the tree-line, trying to figure out if there are any signs of life in the abandoned building some distance away.

He has military-grade infrared binoculars (thanks, Allison), and he half expects someone to be barking orders through the static in the earpiece he doesn’t have but can feel against the side of his face if he doesn’t concentrate enough.

As it happens, no one barks orders at him through static, unless you want to call Derek’s occasional exasperated grunts static.

Which you don’t. Stiles knows this from experience. Not that he doesn’t like saying and doing stuff that makes Derek roll his eyes and judge him with his eyebrows.

So yeah, Derek’s there, in the Jeep, because of reasons Stiles doesn’t know because he’s pretty sure that part of the strategy-planning went by without no one telling him, even though he’s absolutely convinced he was in the room, so he’ll just have to deal, and he’s just so totally _done_ with all this bullshit and not having a clue most of the time, but having to pretend he does, because no one needs to worry about _him_ , okay.

Nothing happens, but the world is different shades of red and orange through the binoculars, and Stiles wonders if that’s how the wolves see everything, all the time, and if they, too, are kind of color blind like dogs are. Although there probably was something about dogs not being color blind after all, in some article somewhere on the internet, unless he imagined it, which he doubts, because his asshole of a brain clearly likes focus its energy into creating various gory scenarios in which everyone is pulverized into nothing but bone dust and guts, and somehow Stiles ends up being the one with blood on his trembling hands. So dogs probably aren’t color blind after all.

He blinks slowly and the binoculars bump against the car window, so he lowers them and just looks. Derek probably says something about Stiles’ sub-par vision and how he isn’t of much use because he can’t see shit in the dark, or maybe Derek just blinks really slowly too, but he doesn’t have binoculars, so Stiles can’t be sure.

There’s static through the ear-piece he doesn’t have, and it’s kind of cold in the car, but the window is cool against his forehead, so he just sighs and wonders if reality is real at all, and if that’s his choice to make.

It’s dark out, and somehow he hears the hum in his brain, and it’s completely peaceful and calm for a moment, and another moment, and he blinks slowly once, twice, six times, his breathing fogging up the window.

It’s dark, and warm, and soft and he just wants to burrow deeper into the soft leather under his cheek and the arm across his shoulders, but the knocking on the window is persistent, and there’s oranges and pinks splashed across the horizon, and the sun is almost up, and Scott is grinning at him, them, through the window.

And it’s not like Derek and him ever mention it again, but Stiles is pretty sure he’s not the only one who refers to it as the Best Nap Ever, even if it changes nothing, really.

 

**Author's Note:**

> I hang out on [Tumblr](http://elsmaster.tumblr.com), and I also know night vision binoculars make everything green.


End file.
